BlogOn Boot Camp’s hunt for a business model continues (last of two parts).

(Ed. Note: To make this feel like a real blog, pretend you’re reading it from the bottom up. Otherwise, this stream-of-consciousness approach will just seem weird. This is just as I wrote it during the four-hour Boot Camp, although we corrected spelling, since I have dyslexic fingers.)

Read part one.

BERKELEY, CA -- And we’re back and getting practical. Steve Ruble from Cooper and Katz is talking about how to publish to as many aggregators as possible -- or read as many as possible? I was checking my email and missed it. His favorite is FeedDemon,  the Atom/RSS feeder. OK, he’s showing us how to aggregate feeds. Simple enough that I won’t go into it here, except to say just click and follow the directions. Just as an FYI, only NetNewswire and Bloglines seem to be Mac compatible, although Apple will include an RSS reader in the next version of its way-cool Safari browser. I believe Mozilla.org’s Firefox beta has it, too -- I love Firefox!

Finally! Some conversation about a brand using blogs. Microsoft. Robert Scoble, one guy, who blogs constantly. He’s inside the company but if he disses Microsoft, as one panelist said, "They know where he lives." His job is to serve as an evangelist for the platform.

"Is there any etiquette in blogging?" someone asked. So far, it seems the only rule is that there are no rules. Other than common sense, I hope.

How do you keep that balance? Companies have fired bloggers for what they’ve posted about the company. Others let them blog. It seems to be self-correcting, though. Check whether blogging falls under your normal corporate guidelines, policies, confidentiality, and other legal and HR stuff.

Know your audience, and know that nothing is private. Scoble has a corporate blogging manifesto -- Google that.

I can see right through you

And another segue -- to "transparency," then to social networking, but not the kind where you drink and hand out business cards. Bloggers love to look under the hood and be informal. Speaker is Jerry Michalski, from Sociate, a self-described Wiki-holic and blog-mute (doesn’t blog frequently). Says jargon is sign of a healthy industry -- people create names for things that natter -- was that a Freudian slip? I meant matter.

First applause of the day, for his history of blogging. Basically, we’ve become a giant brain. A coral reef with keyboards. The collected consciousness, if you will.

Now that the applause died down, we’re off into social networking. I’m registered on several of these -- LinkedIn, Ryze, Orkut, Tribe, 6Degrees, Lovemeori’lljumpoffhthisbridge.com, and some others. But I’ve never actually used them. In fact, the invitations to new ones usually come from people I’m already linked with on the other dozen that dribble into my mailbox. What are these wacky things for?

There seem to be, they say, an exceptional number of Brazilians on Orkut. Why? I’m fascinated by weird things like this. I’m also fascinated by the things people will post on these things -- sexual preferences while job hunting.

He tells of one guy who walks up to people and yells: "Are you my friend or not!?" Which is the basic model that these SN thingies use.

LinkedIn BlogOn group… that one I might join.

Finally! How does this fit into the blogosphere? These are links between people, rather than ideas. The connection of people isn’t as interesting, as the ability to debate ideas.

Moving on -- they’re doing a great job sticking to the schedule. Next up, Ross Mayfield, Socialtext. They do enterprise social software. We’re heading into wacky Wiki territory. Did I miss the definition? Ahhh … it’s a group-editable Web site. I’m guessing it’s different than IM in that it lives, rather than just being real-time. And it’s more asynchronous than email.

There are open-source Wikis. This is something you can use in your company, but it’s not something you can make a business out of.

Now we’re playing with the interface. It works. And I especially like that you can muck up somebody else’s work. Oops, wait, I mean I like that it fosters trust between colleagues. Ahh, it keeps track of changes.

Hello? Anyone out there? And assorted bits of stuff…

I’m still not getting any idea of what the business model for blogging is. Maybe there isn’t one? We’re at the end of the day. It’s been a good overview, but it’s like taking a test drive of a car before you talk price. It’s fun to play with, but it’s not yet a workhorse.

But maybe that’s enough?

And we’re in the wrap-up. The Q&A. Yes, I do have a better understanding of the onion layers that are blog after this.

It just occurred to me that this is Marshall McLuhan’s global village.

But as Phil, the moderator, says, you have to be a bit brain-damaged to do this. The average blogger is a 17-year-old girl (or pretending to be one?). It’s all over -- China, Poland. Now Iran is up to 500,000 blogs from 100,000. But I don’t type in Farsi. Most blogs are about their social lives.

Thirty seconds on Mayfield’s Power Loss. Uh-oh a chart. Links on vertical, blogs on horizontal. One over N? what does that mean? Oh, big blogs have big links, but the majority of blogs have very few.

David Weinberger once said, "In the blogosphere, everyone’s famous for 15 people." It’s small, but it’s a community that cares about what I have to say.

Thirty percent of blogs on Typepad are private, not public.

Interesting idea -- Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, refers reporters to his blog, rather than doing interviews all the time. Gets your message directly out directly. So you need to get someone like Scoble, and make yourself transparent.

Blogging isn’t the tool. We did the same thing with HTML for years. Blogging is about the act of writing.

This is informal communication. So the question is: How do we get to this personal level, yet keep our business model? People want trusted sources, so this -- everyone in this room hopes -- is the fusion, or will find the fusion of dollars, coolness and mind-changing impact.

The 600 to 800 bloggers at Microsoft seem to be changing the perception of MS -- gives it a human voice.

Are people lonely? Is that why they blog? Is it seedy? Not as much as you would think by the media -- that’s from one audience member. My take -- so what?

Blog because you want to blog. Blog because you want to hear what the people really feel instead of leading the witnesses.

Anybody can touch the world with a blog. It’s the ultimate egalitarian medium. Whether you can get paid for it is still up for grabs.